“She said if we leave the south of Iraq, the Iranians will take it over,” said one MP.

Another said: “She is very forceful and some of my colleagues were intimidated by her muscular style.”

The MPs also saw Henry Worcester, Deputy Director of the Office of Iranian Affairs, who said he favoured talks with Iran.

The Pentagon denied Ms Cagan said she “hated” Iranians.

“She doesn’t speak that way,” said an official.

But when The Mail on Sunday spoke to four of the six MPs, three confirmed privately that she made the remark and one declined to comment. The other two could not be contacted.

Americans; petty rascist businessmen (definitely a pejorative term), no better than classless southern hicks, or rabidly murderous Zionists, with their disgustingly medieval propensity for murdering those of a brown(er) complexion, with little or no sense of style (see picture above), unashamedly appropriating third-rate philosophy as a means of concealing their sociopathic nature.

Won’t anyone capture and / or kill these terrorists? And why not start with this vile American woman.

The eruption of gunfire was sudden and ferocious, round after round mowing down terrified men women and children, slamming into cars as they collided and overturned with drivers frantically trying to escape. Some vehicles were set alight by exploding petrol tanks. A mother and her infant child died in one of them, trapped in the flames.

The shooting on Sunday, by the guards of the American private security company Blackwater, has sparked one of the most bitter and public disputes between the Iraqi government and its American patrons, and brings into sharp focus the often violent conduct of the Western private armies operating in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, immune from scrutiny or prosecution.

Blackwater’s security men are accused of going on an unprovoked killing spree. Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer, was shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets, as he attempted to get away from their convoy. Yesterday, sitting swathed in bandages at Baghdad’s Yarmukh Hospital, he recalled scenes of horror. “I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot,” said Mr Salman. “But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid.”

At the end of the prolonged hail of bullets Nisoor Square was a scene of carnage with bodies strewn around smouldering wreckage. Ambulances trying to pick up the wounded found their path blocked by crowds fleeing the gunfire.

Yesterday, the death toll from the incident, according to Iraqi authorities, stood at 28. And it could rise higher, say doctors, as some of the injured, hit by high-velocity bullets at close quarter, are unlikely to survive.

With public anger among Iraqis showing no sign of abating, the US administration has suspended all land movement by officials outside the heavily fortified Green Zone.

The Iraqi government has revoked Blackwater’s licence to operate but it still remains employed by the US government. The Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has, however, promised a “transparent” inquiry into what happened.

Blackwater and the US State Department maintain that the guards opened fire in self-defence as they reacted to a bomb blast and then sniper fire. Amid continuing accusations and recriminations, The Independent has tried to piece together events on that day.

The reports we got from members of the public, Iraqi security personnel and government officials, as well as our own research, leads to a markedly different scenario than the American version. There was a bomb blast. But it was too far away to pose any danger to the Blackwater guards, and their State Department charges. We have found no Iraqi present at the scene who saw or heard sniper fire.

Witnesses say the first victims of the shootings were a couple with their child, the mother and infant meeting horrific deaths, their bodies fused together by heat after their car caught fire. The contractors, according to this account, also shot Iraqi soldiers and police and Blackwater then called in an attack helicopter from its private air force which inflicted further casualties.

Blackwater disputes most of this. In a statement the company declared that those killed were “armed insurgents and our personnel acted lawfully and appropriately in a war zone protecting American lives”.

The day after the killings, Mirenbe Nantongo, a spokeswoman for the US embassy, said the Blackwater team had ” reacted to a car bombing”. The embassy’s information officer, Johann Schmonsees, stressed ” the car bomb was in proximity to the place where State Department personnel were meeting, and that was the reason why Blackwater responded to the incident” .

Those on the receiving end tell another story. Mr Salman said he had turned into Nisoor Square behind the Blackwater convoy when the shooting began. He recalled: “There were eight foreigners in four utility vehicles, I heard an explosion in the distance and then the foreigners started shouting and signalling for us to go back. I turned the car around and must have driven about a hundred feet when they started shooting. My car was hit with 12 bullets it turned over. Four bullets hit me in the back and another in the arm. Why they opened fire? I do not know. No one, I repeat no one, had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot.”

Muhammed Hussein, whose brother was killed in the shooting, said: “My brother was driving and we saw a black convoy ahead of us. Then I saw my brother suddenly slump in the car. I dragged him out of the car and saw he had been shot in the chest. I tried to hide us both from the firing, but then I realised he was already dead.”

Jawad Karim Ali was on his way to pick up his aunt from Yarmukh Hospital when shooting started and the windscreen exploded cutting his face. ” Then I was hit on my left shoulder by bullets, two of them another one went past my face. Now my aunt is out of hospital and I am sitting here. There was a big bang further away but no shots before the security people fired, and they just kept firing.”

Baghdad’s “Bloody Sunday” has become a test of sovereignty between the powers of the Iraqi government and the US. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said: “We will not tolerate the killing of our citizens in cold blood.” The shooting was, he said, the seventh of its kind involving Blackwater.

The company, which has its headquarters in North Carolina, is one of the largest beneficiaries of the lucrative occupation dividend, holding the contract to provide security for top-level American officials.

Its reputation in Iraq is particularly controversial. It was the lynching of four of the company’s employees in 2004 which led to the bloody confrontation in Fallujah. The men’s bodies were set on fire, dragged through the streets and then hung from a bridge. Blackwater personnel are recognisable from their “uniform” of wraparound sunglasses and body armour over dark coloured sweatshirts and helmets. Employees are thought to earn about $600 (£300) per day.

Sunday’s shooting happened at Mansour, once one of the most fashionable districts of Baghdad, with roads flanked by shops selling expensive goods, restaurants and art galleries. In the height of the sectarian bloodletting between Shias and Sunnis earlier this year dead bodies would be regularly strewn in the streets. A semblance of safety has returned since, and Mansour was held up as an example of how the US military “surge” was cutting the violence.

We were in Mansour on Sunday when we heard the sound of a deafening explosion just after midday. Black plumes of smoke rose from a half-blasted National Guard (army) post near a mosque. Five or six minutes afterwards there was the sound of prolonged shooting towards the south.

Police Captain Ali Ibrahim, who was on duty near Nisoor Square, said: ” We heard the bomb go off, it was very loud, but it wasn’t at the square. The police were, in fact, trying to clear the way for the contractors when they became agitated, they opened fire. No one was shooting at them.”

Asked about the witness accounts, Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman, confirmed: “The traffic policemen were trying to open the road for them. It was a crowded square and one small car did not stop, it was moving very slowly. They started shooting randomly, there was a couple and their child inside the car and they were hit.”

Jack-booted mass murderers. America is exporting it’s own brand of horror, and is making quite a lot of money from doing so. Won’t anyone capture and / or kill these terrorists?

The Russian authorities have been filmed apparently using a sedative to silence a particularly vocal critic among angry relatives of the Kursk sailors.

In Russia they use sedatives to silence critics, in America they use tasers. No, don’t get up America, it’s only a commercial.

Images of the incident have been broadcast and published throughout the world. They show the young blonde woman – the mother of one of the sailors who died horribly in the Kursk submarine – screaming her angry comments at Ilya Klebanov, the deputy prime minister in charge of investigating the disaster. An officer tries, without success, to calm the woman, before a nurse slides into the picture, clearly holding a hypodermic syringe. Moments later, the blond woman slumps to the ground, before being helped to a chair.

It doesn’t matter the guy was an obnoxious dick, that he probably barged in and tried to take over, that he gave a running commentary on his experience in a typically loud American manner, that he (rightly or wrongly) resisted arrest (if you can call what he did resisting arrest); there is no possible justification for his treatment, especially when you see that the taser was administered while he was pinned to the ground by 4 or 5 officers of the law (i.e. when he was in no position to offer any resistance, and not capable of injuring anyone).

Most disturbingly, if you look behind the guy being assaulted, to the right of the picture, you can see a suited gentleman (possibly a spook) signaling (to other cops?) to cut the proceedings, synchronized to the mention of Skull and Bones.

From the comments;

The only crime being tragedy here was the failure to kick him after the tazer. Oh, and for those of you from Europe with something bad to say about the US , I think your time would be better spent trying to control your “ethnic gangs” that run free and are on the brink of taking you over. EuAriba is right. Mohammed likely to top British boys’ names list by year-end, yeah, STFU.